Page 115 of Rears & Vices

Everard seized on that. York—where they had supposedly met Vitya? “York… when?”

“You do make a good distraction, Ever, even if you have a tendency to step in and tread over my plans at regular intervals.”

Everard could only utter a weak “Have I?”

“Yes, though I can’t fault you for it, since it’s inadvertent. D’you know Vee abandoned me at the market that day?”

Everard’s heart sank. “No?”

“He was my American contact. I had to get up at two in the morning and meet him again after; would you believe the nerve?”

“Two in the… I cannot believe you. No.”

York. Where Everard hadn’t been plucked straight from the crowd. Where Vitaliy hadn’t made an extraordinary risk, hadn’t taken really any risks at all; D’Arcy had been a sure, known thing to him, since they had… had already shared some kind of intimacy, unknown.

It made Everard just… an option. Distraction. Maybe a slightly intriguing one—Vitaliy hadn’t feigned wanting him; he knew that much—but an option nonetheless.

“Of course you were worth it, but…” D’Arcy rolled his eyes. “Impulsive bastard.”

Everard marvelled that there could be still so much antagonism between two men who’d had Everard between them—in every possible sense—for almost every night of the past week.

Was Everard just a kind of reconciliatory glue? A stepstone transition?

Perhaps he was merely in the way.

“What else?” he croaked. “What else have I… trod upon? Were you going to throw Vitya’s court martial, in Kingston? Was that planned, too?”

D’Arcy stood, took Everard’s hands gently in his. “No, I swear. That wasn’t planned. That’s not to say I would’ve let him hang—I would’ve done what I could once that blindfold came free and I saw who it was, even if he wasn’t… yours. But that day was all you, Everard, every bit of it. Your bravery and selflessness and love. Yours.”

Everard felt his brow furrow in his skepticism. “It wasn’t but selfishness. Vitya didn’t want me to have done it. Probably because it royally trod upon your… mutual what-have-you agenda. Mayhap you had him brought to Kingston specially, to free him yourself. Perhaps you have that influence. I don’t know, because you haven’t said the extent!”

D’Arcy let out a long breath.

Everard said, “D’you see? How can I possibly believe any of it?”

“Believe it if you can,” D’Arcy said wearily. “I can’t ask more of you. I don’t know how to make you believe, as I can’t prove it. But it’s all true, I swear it. Vee will too, once he’s more solidly conscious. And—we ought go see if he is by now, don’t you think?”

“Not yet, no.” Everard shook his head. “We’ve known each other seven bloody years, Preston. To think that even before York, you were turned. I cannot…”

He tried to turn away from D’Arcy’s hazel sincerity, couldn’t.

Every memory was suddenly in question. He wanted to go back, spin through, revisit; revise appropriately, if he could. He wasn’t sure even his memory worked that way. It was extraordinarily faithful, but of a certain kind: a faithfulness to the one and only perspective he’d had to look through at the time. A tainted, hopelessly naïve perspective.

“I can see you thinking,” D’Arcy said. “Your career was your own, Everard. Nothing I informed on directly affected you.”

“That cannot be anything but a bald lie. It’d have made you a useless spy.”

D’Arcy crossed his arms, hunched his shoulders. “Thank you,” he muttered sarcastically. “Yes, well, it’s true.”

“Even the Wanderer?”

“Especially the Wanderer,” D’Arcy emphasised. A tiny, hopeful twitch crept into the corners of his wavering smile. “Am I absolved?”

“Sant Jesús,” Everard cursed vehemently. “I don’t…”

Three years. Three years during which the other two had known not only each other but had shared knowledge, and values, and bodies—and, on top of all that, had shared some kind of secret so large that neither of them had been able to trust Everard’s own intelligence and discretion and mutual damned values enough to divulge it.

Three years, leaving Everard out in the cold.